Will Anyone Remember 11 Dead Jews?
Eric Lidji is a man who cares deeply about modest ambitions. He has lived in Pittsburgh on and off for 20 years. It is a city perfectly sized to his sensibility, neither very small nor very large—a place known to but mostly ignored by those who do not live there. Lidji, 36, has held many jobs; most recently, in late 2017, he became the director and only permanent staff member of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives, a repository of early-20th-century local Yiddish-theater posters as well as records from dozens of small-town synagogues in western Pennsylvania. But even before he became an archivist, Lidji’s work has always been the same: He is a diarist of small delights, a chronicler of curios, an ardent psalmist of Pittsburgh’s quirky charms.
Like many of the 49,000 other Jews in the Pittsburgh area, Lidji was socializing at a local synagogue on the final Saturday in October last year when he heard the first rumors of a shooting at the nearby Tree of Life synagogue. The news was soon confirmed: Eleven Jewish worshippers had been murdered. Lidji felt paralyzed: Shabbat, the Jewish day of rest, was still ongoing, and he wasn’t sure what to do. It wasn’t until a few hours later that something clicked, and Lidji felt a certain desperation stirring alongside his sorrow. Already, people were laying artwork and stones, which Jews customarily place on graves, on the sidewalk around the synagogue where the shooting had taken place.
